National Container Traffic Trends

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Looking at the genesis of global container trade, India is relatively a recent entrant in container cargo business. The port sector in India started getting small number of cargo containers during the decade of seventies and volumes could barely pick up until after the establishment of JNPT in the early nineties. The total container cargo volume handled by Indian ports actually crossed one million TEU benchmark only as late as 1994, thanks to the establishment of JNPT. There has however, been no looking back since then and container traffic volumes have grown by an impressive CAGR of 14 % till 2000-01.

Despite this impressive growth over past ten years, the national container cargo market in India can still be termed as being in a formative phase. This phase has however, seen its culmination in the development of modern international container terminal at Nhava Sheva, with strategic private sector participation from P&O Ports. The Nhava Sheva port, including the JNP and the NSICT container terminals, touched a landmark performance of handling one million TEU in 2000-01 and currently together represent a share of over 48 per cent in the total container traffic handled at all major ports n the country.

The success of JNP as a modern international container terminal has thus, set the pace for development of several other container terminal projects in the country, most notably Mundra and Pipavav ports, both under the private sector initiatives. The push towards what can be termed a "multiple container port" system in the country, is also leading to new competitive market conditions with each new container port terminal seeking to carve its share of the national container traffic. The existing major ports such as Kandla, Cochin and Visakapatanam have also been actively seeking private sector participation for upgrading their existing container handling facilities in anticipation of increasing traffic volumes in future. Whether development of port infrastructure will itself spur the future growth of container traffic into the country or whether incremental container traffic growth will in itself drive the future development of ports, is the familiar "Chicken first or Egg first" story that is doing its rounds in the Indian maritime sector.